This month, the chief executive officers of America's biggest companies went on a media blitz to decry the uncertainty caused by the fiscal cliff. I departed Washington in the midst of these rumblings to attend a forum of Africa's leading CEOs. Mo Ibrahim, founding CEO of Celtel. MORE

The worldwide trend of rising economic inequality applies not only to individuals. companies’ return on invested capital (ROIC), and compare it with economy-wide ROIC estimates constructed by Deloitte. The comparison is imprecise, of course, but nevertheless suggestive. MORE

Most entrepreneurs, if they had full visibility into the performance of each VC firm, would choose to partner with a top performer. Instead of looking at fund returns to judge VCs, many entrepreneurs treat a firm’s brand or logos as a proxy for performance. MORE

NEWS AND INSIGHTS UPDATE: A study by the National Association of Investment Companies (NAIC) found that the funds managed by its member firms (79% of which are owned by minorities and 69% of which have women or minorities in at least half of the investment roles) had a median net internal rateofreturnof 15% from 1998-2011. rateofreturn for the U.S. MORE

People often talk increasing the return on investment for training, and generally, most people point to others to be responsible for that return, or measure that return. The reality is that there are three groups and one other factor that have significant impact on that rateofreturn, and they work together like the four [.]. MORE

There are a variety of ways to calculate a return on investment (ROI) — net present value , internal rateofreturn , breakeven — but the simplest is payback period. This is the major limitation of the payback method. MORE

It may seem that the employers of such low-wage workers — who focus mainly on keeping costs down in order to survive in a relentlessly competitive industry — would have no incentive to provide such training or resources for personal development. We measured the impacts of soft skills training on workplace outcomes such as retention, productivity, and salary, using the firm’s administrative data along with changes in knowledge, behaviors, and personality traits of workers. MORE

According to the American Heart Association , research shows that employers that spend on health promotion and chronic disease prevention programs achieve a rateofreturn on investment ranging from $3 to $15 for each dollar invested with savings realized within 12 to 18 months. MORE

I've followed the greening of the retail giant fairly closely for years, so I wasn't expecting a lot of new information from Bedore, Walmart's Senior Director of Business Strategy and Sustainability. But amidst a seemingly scripted set of responses on Walmart's supply chain and operational greening efforts, the discussion took an interesting turn. When addressing the company's aspirational goal of using 100% renewable energy, Bedore said two noteworthy things. MORE

” You might have missed this story — or at least assumed that designing a fiduciary standard is the fraught work of policy makers. The details of the proposed new rules are sure to raise questions about things like fee disclosures and conflicts of interest. MORE

A key aspect of risk intelligence is recognizing the limits to your knowledge. People's judgment of risks is deeply compromised by psychological biases. Since then, numerous studies have found evidence of the bias at racetracks and other sports betting markets all around the world. MORE

Over 20 years ago, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter introduced the Porter hypothesis , which posits that environmental regulation can benefit companies by nudging them to explore their current production methods and eliminate costly waste that they have been blissfully unaware of. Nobel laureate Herbert Simon’s model of bounded rationality in decision making explains how this could work. MORE

Can you justify the price tag of the ad you want to buy or the marketing campaign you’re hoping to launch next quarter? If the company doesn’t sell the equivalent of the BEQ as a result of the investment, then it’s losing money and it won’t recoup its costs. MORE

Microsoft’s recent Tay debacle is a perfect example of what happens when you don’t take machine learning “training” seriously enough. “This goes to the heart of intelligent systems design,” asserts Jerry Kaplan, author of Humans Need Not Apply. MORE

If paying excessive CEO salaries is the most maligned use of corporate funds, stock buybacks may well take second place. It boosts prices in the short run, but the real way to boost the value of a corporation is to invest in the future, and they are not doing that.” ” The UK Government is launching an inquiry into buybacks , due to concerns that they “may be crowding out the allocation of surplus capital to productive investment.” MORE

We identified three emerging market risks that are top multinational leaders should be paying more attention to this year: the election of populists in Brazil and Mexico increasing the cost of doing business. If these events occur, they would severely disrupt multinationals’ market strategies, supply chains, and exchange-rate assumptions. real GDP growth rate for the region, but there is more business risk than many expect. Navy for the better part of a century. MORE

Back in 2011, the McKinsey Global Institute published a report on the transformational potential of big data—and it would take a supercomputer to process all of the articles that have appeared since then urging companies to get on board before some digital disruptor renders them obsolete. And yet for all the hype, most industries have still not come close to realizing the full potential of data and analytics. MORE

On September 13, 1970, The New York Times published an article by Milton Friedman castigating any managers of businesses who were “spending someone else’s money for a general social interest” – in other words, requiring customers to pay more, employees to be paid less, or owners to accept smaller profits so that the firm could exhibit some amount of social responsibility beyond the requirements of the law. Very quickly, shareholder value became the gospel of capitalism. MORE

It had been over five years since the Nasdaq peaked in March 2000, and it was becoming apparent that VC firms were having trouble deploying the tens of billions of dollars they raised during the boom years. Graham argued that the proliferation of money combined with the decreasing costs to start a business were making the VC job more difficult, prophesying significant changes for the industry. MORE

According to a growing chorus of critics, America has a “monopoly problem.” Carl Shapiro is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, an expert in antitrust, and served at the Department of Justice during the Obama and Clinton administrations. He also served on the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama. In a new paper , he reviews the evidence of growing concentration in the U.S. MORE

PE firms typically buy controlling shares of private or public firms, often funded by debt, with the hope of later taking them public or selling them to another company in order to turn a profit. We also ask questions about the organization of the private equity firms themselves. MORE

2013 had all the signs of being a comeback year for venture capital. The industry realized its highest returns since the Internet boom. The industry’s persistent inability to outperform public equities is a disappointment to investors, and a very real threat to the sustainability of the VC industry as we know it. The ongoing poor performance of venture capital firms should be an obvious problem for institutional investors. What is the optimum level of VC commit? MORE

helped to develop the principle of shifting from low-frequency, high-volume irrigation to high-frequency, low-volume irrigation", the system known as drip irrigation. Netafim now controls over one-third of the market for this seemingly commoditized micro-irrigation equipment market. MORE

There is an answer, and it has to do with the dynamics of disruption. One of the most powerful corporate growth mechanisms – and at the heart of disruption theory — is moving upmarket. After all, in 2015 Nucor recycled 17 million tons of scrap. MORE

This post was recently published in SmartBlog on Leadership : According to a new study by the Korn-Ferry Institute, “knowing thyself” isn’t just a nice-to-to; self-awareness flows directly to a firm’s bottom-line I’ve been sharing this information with my network and it’s generating a lot of interest. A blind spot is defined as a skill that the professional counted among his or her strengths, when coworkers cited that same skill as one of the professional’s weaknesses. MORE

Your company is ready to make a big purchase — a fleet of cars, a piece of manufacturing equipment, a new computer system. But before anyone writes a check, you need to calculate the return on investment (ROI) by comparing the expected benefits with the costs. MORE

I heard the following simple but powerful little lesson from a Fortune 500 executive last week: As a leader, if you want to create a culture of innovation, you need to create an environment where all employees feel encouraged to bring new ideas forward. MORE

Any time you propose a capital expenditure, you can be sure senior leaders will want to know what the return on investment (ROI) is. There are a variety of methods you can use to calculate ROI — net present value , payback, breakeven — and internal rateofreturn , or IRR. MORE

Only 8% of venture capital (VC) firms in the U.S. But what much of the VC world might not realize, is that female-led firms may have a higher rateofreturn on average than male-led firms. According to First Round Capital’s review of their own holdings, female founders’ companies out-performed their male peers’ by 63% in terms of creating value for investors. of VC funding in 2015 went to firms founded by women of color. MORE

First, private citizens, particularly younger people, are choosing different types of career paths. Second, changes in technology have dramatically lowered the cost of experimentation and create unprecedented transparency into problems, solutions, and results. Take the story of Salman Khan and the eponymous Khan Academy. The same is true of everyone on his team. Distributing content over the Internet is also inexpensive, while reaching a potential audience of billions. MORE

On top of that, their day will be spent talking on the phone or Skype, using instant messaging all day, being interrupted for “urgent” matters, and attending meetings. Unfortunately much of it is just noise. I’m willing to bet that 70% to 80% of the communication that’s going on in our workplaces (maybe even yours) is irrelevant, annoying, cover the butt-ish, or just plan blah-blah-blah. . How many email messages do you get in a day? MORE

Most of what an organization chooses to measure, and to do, must hinge on this question. I recently had the opportunity to learn from what, in design-speak, we might call an “edge case” of this: the question of what measures should guide the management of a church. MORE

You’ve got an idea for a new product line, a way to revamp your inventory management system, or a piece of equipment that will make your work easier. You’ll likely be asked to show that the return on the investment will be better than your company’s cost of capital. MORE

New research from DDI and The Conference Board, titled The Global Leadership Forecast (GLF) 2014 | 2015, Ready-Now Leaders: Meeting Tomorrow’s Business Challenges , examines the relationship between leadership practices and financial performance in this environment and identifies the seven specific leadership best practices most unique to organizations in the top 20 percent of financial performance. . Those in the bottom 20 percent counted only 19 percent of their leaders as women. MORE

The ways those people interact with technology and each other can completely change the effectiveness of your security strategy. So security products and tools must take into account the human context of the problems they’re solving — and that requires empathy. MORE

At the same time, the cost of renewable energy has dropped very far, very fast. It’s a perfect storm bringing us to two important tipping points: one of belief and commitment to action, and one of economics. First, though, a few of the highlights from the business community: In June, former U.S. One exciting offshoot of We Mean Business, called RE100 launched as well, with Swiss Re, Mars, IKEA, and others making the bold commitment to use 100% renewable energy. MORE

Claims about making a difference are no longer sufficient; evidence of how much difference you're making is now required. I studied three organizations at the vanguard of performance measurement: Acumen Fund , Robin Hood Foundation , and Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). MORE

In the first few years of this blog I posted occasionally, but still much more than the last few years, on investing and economics. I was recently interviewed about investing strategies and thoughts and decided to share that with the readers of this blog. The stocks in the portfolio for the entire period are: Google, Amazon, Toyota, Intel, Pfizer… We got out of the “Too Big to Fail” crisis, but have not addressed the core problems – and likely have made them much worse. MORE

Most of the money tied to cancer research comes from the federal government via the National Institutes of Health, and like many programs facing financial scrutiny, the NIH’s budget is on the verge of being trimmed. One cancer trial costs about $200 million and has fairly low odds of success. But if you do lots of research and conduct many trials at the same time, your odds of success are greater. businesses, fill 16 percent of seats on U.S. MORE

It is about looking beyond the moment of the sale. The fact is, without customers, the organization will cease to exist – regardless of type. Whether for-profit or non-profit, secular or religious, customers are the essence of the business. What is the rateofreturn customers? MORE

out of the Paris agreement. It is very possible that global cooperation to fight climate change will collapse as a result of the Trump presidency. And yet by my rough estimate nearly every firm in the Fortune 500 has acknowledged the reality of climate change, as have thousands of other companies. Many have developed programs designed to address it, while simultaneously generating significant returns for shareholders. MORE

To enhance financial flexibility, companies have been retaining unprecedented amounts of cash on their balance sheets, calling it "strategic" cash to distinguish it from the "operating" cash that is needed to run the business. This raises the question of whether retaining strategic cash makes economic sense and should be viewed as a legitimate corporate finance tool in today's environment. Much of the strategic cash is typically held outside the United States. MORE

An analysis by Korn Ferry (NYSE:KFY) shows that public companies with a higher rateofreturn (ROR) also employ professionals who exhibit higher levels of self-awareness. . The frequency of such blind spots was then gauged against the ROR of those companies’ stock. MORE

NEWS AND INSIGHTS UPDATE: A study by the National Association of Investment Companies (NAIC) found that the funds managed by its member firms (79% of which are owned by minorities and 69% of which have women or minorities in at least half of the investment roles) had a median net internal rateofreturnof 15% from 1998-2011. rateofreturn for the U.S.

Any time you propose a capital expenditure, you can be sure senior leaders will want to know what the return on investment (ROI) is. There are a variety of methods you can use to calculate ROI — net present value , payback, breakeven — and internal rateofreturn , or IRR.

People often talk increasing the return on investment for training, and generally, most people point to others to be responsible for that return, or measure that return. The reality is that there are three groups and one other factor that have significant impact on that rateofreturn, and they work together like the four [.].

An analysis by Korn Ferry (NYSE:KFY) shows that public companies with a higher rateofreturn (ROR) also employ professionals who exhibit higher levels of self-awareness. . The frequency of such blind spots was then gauged against the ROR of those companies’ stock.

I heard the following simple but powerful little lesson from a Fortune 500 executive last week: As a leader, if you want to create a culture of innovation, you need to create an environment where all employees feel encouraged to bring new ideas forward.

According to the American Heart Association , research shows that employers that spend on health promotion and chronic disease prevention programs achieve a rateofreturn on investment ranging from $3 to $15 for each dollar invested with savings realized within 12 to 18 months.

On top of that, their day will be spent talking on the phone or Skype, using instant messaging all day, being interrupted for “urgent” matters, and attending meetings. Unfortunately much of it is just noise. I’m willing to bet that 70% to 80% of the communication that’s going on in our workplaces (maybe even yours) is irrelevant, annoying, cover the butt-ish, or just plan blah-blah-blah. . How many email messages do you get in a day?

This post was recently published in SmartBlog on Leadership : According to a new study by the Korn-Ferry Institute, “knowing thyself” isn’t just a nice-to-to; self-awareness flows directly to a firm’s bottom-line I’ve been sharing this information with my network and it’s generating a lot of interest. A blind spot is defined as a skill that the professional counted among his or her strengths, when coworkers cited that same skill as one of the professional’s weaknesses.

New research from DDI and The Conference Board, titled The Global Leadership Forecast (GLF) 2014 | 2015, Ready-Now Leaders: Meeting Tomorrow’s Business Challenges , examines the relationship between leadership practices and financial performance in this environment and identifies the seven specific leadership best practices most unique to organizations in the top 20 percent of financial performance. . Those in the bottom 20 percent counted only 19 percent of their leaders as women.

It is about looking beyond the moment of the sale. The fact is, without customers, the organization will cease to exist – regardless of type. Whether for-profit or non-profit, secular or religious, customers are the essence of the business. What is the rateofreturn customers?

There are a variety of ways to calculate a return on investment (ROI) — net present value , internal rateofreturn , breakeven — but the simplest is payback period. This is the major limitation of the payback method.

In the first few years of this blog I posted occasionally, but still much more than the last few years, on investing and economics. I was recently interviewed about investing strategies and thoughts and decided to share that with the readers of this blog. The stocks in the portfolio for the entire period are: Google, Amazon, Toyota, Intel, Pfizer… We got out of the “Too Big to Fail” crisis, but have not addressed the core problems – and likely have made them much worse.

PE firms typically buy controlling shares of private or public firms, often funded by debt, with the hope of later taking them public or selling them to another company in order to turn a profit. We also ask questions about the organization of the private equity firms themselves.

out of the Paris agreement. It is very possible that global cooperation to fight climate change will collapse as a result of the Trump presidency. And yet by my rough estimate nearly every firm in the Fortune 500 has acknowledged the reality of climate change, as have thousands of other companies. Many have developed programs designed to address it, while simultaneously generating significant returns for shareholders.

According to the American Heart Association , research shows that employers that spend on health promotion and chronic disease prevention programs achieve a rateofreturn on investment ranging from $3 to $15 for each dollar invested with savings realized within 12 to 18 months.

On top of that, their day will be spent talking on the phone or Skype, using instant messaging all day, being interrupted for “urgent” matters, and attending meetings. Unfortunately much of it is just noise. I’m willing to bet that 70% to 80% of the communication that’s going on in our workplaces (maybe even yours) is irrelevant, annoying, cover the butt-ish, or just plan blah-blah-blah. . How many email messages do you get in a day?

This post was recently published in SmartBlog on Leadership : According to a new study by the Korn-Ferry Institute, “knowing thyself” isn’t just a nice-to-to; self-awareness flows directly to a firm’s bottom-line I’ve been sharing this information with my network and it’s generating a lot of interest. A blind spot is defined as a skill that the professional counted among his or her strengths, when coworkers cited that same skill as one of the professional’s weaknesses.

Most entrepreneurs, if they had full visibility into the performance of each VC firm, would choose to partner with a top performer. Instead of looking at fund returns to judge VCs, many entrepreneurs treat a firm’s brand or logos as a proxy for performance.

Your company is ready to make a big purchase — a fleet of cars, a piece of manufacturing equipment, a new computer system. But before anyone writes a check, you need to calculate the return on investment (ROI) by comparing the expected benefits with the costs.

It may seem that the employers of such low-wage workers — who focus mainly on keeping costs down in order to survive in a relentlessly competitive industry — would have no incentive to provide such training or resources for personal development. We measured the impacts of soft skills training on workplace outcomes such as retention, productivity, and salary, using the firm’s administrative data along with changes in knowledge, behaviors, and personality traits of workers.

Over 20 years ago, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter introduced the Porter hypothesis , which posits that environmental regulation can benefit companies by nudging them to explore their current production methods and eliminate costly waste that they have been blissfully unaware of. Nobel laureate Herbert Simon’s model of bounded rationality in decision making explains how this could work.

Back in 2011, the McKinsey Global Institute published a report on the transformational potential of big data—and it would take a supercomputer to process all of the articles that have appeared since then urging companies to get on board before some digital disruptor renders them obsolete. And yet for all the hype, most industries have still not come close to realizing the full potential of data and analytics.

This month, the chief executive officers of America's biggest companies went on a media blitz to decry the uncertainty caused by the fiscal cliff. I departed Washington in the midst of these rumblings to attend a forum of Africa's leading CEOs. Mo Ibrahim, founding CEO of Celtel.

If paying excessive CEO salaries is the most maligned use of corporate funds, stock buybacks may well take second place. It boosts prices in the short run, but the real way to boost the value of a corporation is to invest in the future, and they are not doing that.” ” The UK Government is launching an inquiry into buybacks , due to concerns that they “may be crowding out the allocation of surplus capital to productive investment.”

Most of the money tied to cancer research comes from the federal government via the National Institutes of Health, and like many programs facing financial scrutiny, the NIH’s budget is on the verge of being trimmed. One cancer trial costs about $200 million and has fairly low odds of success. But if you do lots of research and conduct many trials at the same time, your odds of success are greater. businesses, fill 16 percent of seats on U.S.

The worldwide trend of rising economic inequality applies not only to individuals. companies’ return on invested capital (ROIC), and compare it with economy-wide ROIC estimates constructed by Deloitte. The comparison is imprecise, of course, but nevertheless suggestive.

The ways those people interact with technology and each other can completely change the effectiveness of your security strategy. So security products and tools must take into account the human context of the problems they’re solving — and that requires empathy.

I've followed the greening of the retail giant fairly closely for years, so I wasn't expecting a lot of new information from Bedore, Walmart's Senior Director of Business Strategy and Sustainability. But amidst a seemingly scripted set of responses on Walmart's supply chain and operational greening efforts, the discussion took an interesting turn. When addressing the company's aspirational goal of using 100% renewable energy, Bedore said two noteworthy things.

We identified three emerging market risks that are top multinational leaders should be paying more attention to this year: the election of populists in Brazil and Mexico increasing the cost of doing business. If these events occur, they would severely disrupt multinationals’ market strategies, supply chains, and exchange-rate assumptions. real GDP growth rate for the region, but there is more business risk than many expect. Navy for the better part of a century.

2013 had all the signs of being a comeback year for venture capital. The industry realized its highest returns since the Internet boom. The industry’s persistent inability to outperform public equities is a disappointment to investors, and a very real threat to the sustainability of the VC industry as we know it. The ongoing poor performance of venture capital firms should be an obvious problem for institutional investors. What is the optimum level of VC commit?

” You might have missed this story — or at least assumed that designing a fiduciary standard is the fraught work of policy makers. The details of the proposed new rules are sure to raise questions about things like fee disclosures and conflicts of interest.

Only 8% of venture capital (VC) firms in the U.S. But what much of the VC world might not realize, is that female-led firms may have a higher rateofreturn on average than male-led firms. According to First Round Capital’s review of their own holdings, female founders’ companies out-performed their male peers’ by 63% in terms of creating value for investors. of VC funding in 2015 went to firms founded by women of color.

Claims about making a difference are no longer sufficient; evidence of how much difference you're making is now required. I studied three organizations at the vanguard of performance measurement: Acumen Fund , Robin Hood Foundation , and Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC).

helped to develop the principle of shifting from low-frequency, high-volume irrigation to high-frequency, low-volume irrigation", the system known as drip irrigation. Netafim now controls over one-third of the market for this seemingly commoditized micro-irrigation equipment market.

There is an answer, and it has to do with the dynamics of disruption. One of the most powerful corporate growth mechanisms – and at the heart of disruption theory — is moving upmarket. After all, in 2015 Nucor recycled 17 million tons of scrap.

A key aspect of risk intelligence is recognizing the limits to your knowledge. People's judgment of risks is deeply compromised by psychological biases. Since then, numerous studies have found evidence of the bias at racetracks and other sports betting markets all around the world.

According to a growing chorus of critics, America has a “monopoly problem.” Carl Shapiro is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, an expert in antitrust, and served at the Department of Justice during the Obama and Clinton administrations. He also served on the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama. In a new paper , he reviews the evidence of growing concentration in the U.S.

Most of what an organization chooses to measure, and to do, must hinge on this question. I recently had the opportunity to learn from what, in design-speak, we might call an “edge case” of this: the question of what measures should guide the management of a church.

You’ve got an idea for a new product line, a way to revamp your inventory management system, or a piece of equipment that will make your work easier. You’ll likely be asked to show that the return on the investment will be better than your company’s cost of capital.

At the same time, the cost of renewable energy has dropped very far, very fast. It’s a perfect storm bringing us to two important tipping points: one of belief and commitment to action, and one of economics. First, though, a few of the highlights from the business community: In June, former U.S. One exciting offshoot of We Mean Business, called RE100 launched as well, with Swiss Re, Mars, IKEA, and others making the bold commitment to use 100% renewable energy.

On September 13, 1970, The New York Times published an article by Milton Friedman castigating any managers of businesses who were “spending someone else’s money for a general social interest” – in other words, requiring customers to pay more, employees to be paid less, or owners to accept smaller profits so that the firm could exhibit some amount of social responsibility beyond the requirements of the law. Very quickly, shareholder value became the gospel of capitalism.

First, private citizens, particularly younger people, are choosing different types of career paths. Second, changes in technology have dramatically lowered the cost of experimentation and create unprecedented transparency into problems, solutions, and results. Take the story of Salman Khan and the eponymous Khan Academy. The same is true of everyone on his team. Distributing content over the Internet is also inexpensive, while reaching a potential audience of billions.

It had been over five years since the Nasdaq peaked in March 2000, and it was becoming apparent that VC firms were having trouble deploying the tens of billions of dollars they raised during the boom years. Graham argued that the proliferation of money combined with the decreasing costs to start a business were making the VC job more difficult, prophesying significant changes for the industry.

To enhance financial flexibility, companies have been retaining unprecedented amounts of cash on their balance sheets, calling it "strategic" cash to distinguish it from the "operating" cash that is needed to run the business. This raises the question of whether retaining strategic cash makes economic sense and should be viewed as a legitimate corporate finance tool in today's environment. Much of the strategic cash is typically held outside the United States.

Can you justify the price tag of the ad you want to buy or the marketing campaign you’re hoping to launch next quarter? If the company doesn’t sell the equivalent of the BEQ as a result of the investment, then it’s losing money and it won’t recoup its costs.